It's a shame he couldn't have hung on for another couple of hours, because Keith Allen's loving and louche Keith Meets Keith (C4) was an entirely fitting send-off for Mr Floyd – a film which was not only a meeting of minds to a soundtrack of chinking glasses and tinkling profanities, but would also have provided the undeniably pinkish Floyd with a This-Is-Your-TV-Life-Flashing-Before-Your-Eyes moment, shortly before the rest of his life actually did.

But though now one can only see the "mourn" and "vino" lurking within "gourmand" and "bon vivant" and the ashtrays of the world are very much emptier without him, it was clear Floyd was living on lily-livered time that was not so much borrowed as pinched from the devil, or Bacchus, or whichever bastard currently claims the best tunes.

The obituaries have been just as fond and warm as they should have been, palpably regretting the loss of a man for whom the tut-tuttery description "incorrigible old rogue" sounds half-arsed, but if he hadn't died would Floyd (rather than the film, which was excellent, as Allen's documentaries invariably are) have had such good reviews? I think probably not.

Keith Floyd, for all his intelligence and wit and charisma in front of a camera, not to mention having written the original recipe for the now ubiquitous breed of free range TV cooks was, after all, not quite a national treasure, because those whose failures are perceived to outweigh their successes are never allowed to be.

Nobody reclines on their death sofa saying "I wish I'd spent a bit more time appearing on the telly", not even those whose appearances were so memorable (and I'll never forget seeing Floyd lean into the camera with his cloth and that "Sorry darling, you're all steamed up") they created and defined the parameters of an entire TV genre. So one can assume that Floyd was aware he would likely be shuffling off with the most important loose ends of his life still untied, and probably more than aware of the fact that it was his responsibility to tie them – and, not, as we saw, painfully and rivetingly in the film, the responsibility of his 26-year-old daughter, Poppy, estranged from him for a decade but here sitting visibly seething at an adjacent table shortly after their off-camera reunion, looking every inch the wounded teenager who has had a poor excuse for a father, while Keith F, in dereliction of his duty, though also in a failed bid to keep all parties satisfied, shot the breeze awkwardly with Keith A.

As I'd recorded the programme on Monday to watch the following day – by which time I knew he'd departed – these scenes seemed far more relevant than all the amusing inter-Keith bantering and cursing, and one was left feeling for poor Poppy (and his son, Patrick) and even the four demonised ex-wives, not to mention Allen, for having just found a soulmate, making such a fine and spookily prescient film and then losing him.

And yes, there was smidgen of regret for the life of Floyd, the hopeless alcoholic, a species for which many of us feel neither fondness nor warmth. But, none the less, what retrospective viewer didn't get goose pimples at the start of the film, when Gary Rhodes referred to its subject in the past tense, and then again, towards the end, when Allen's voiceover spoke of "pictures [of Floyd asleep], mendaciously used in Part I to suggest he was in a coma"?

Perhaps he was too busy creating iconic chrome lemon squeezers of the sort that Floyd would undoubtedly have sneered at, but I can't imagine how the product designer-cum-philosopher Philippe Starck was overlooked as the host of Eurotrash, back in the day.

Whatever. Design for Life (BBC2) is, format-wise, a cross between The Apprentice and MasterChef, with a bunch of wannabe product designers competing for the opportunity of a six-month contract working in Paris at the offices of the reigning king of witty, endlessly referential postmodern consumer silliness. "My name eez Philippe Starcker," said Philippe Starck(er). "I don't have a design philosophy – I think it is a little too small – I try to have a design for life. You maker good designer if you speak about lifer, sexer, flesher, sweater…"

Ah good, I thoughter, this will be fun because Starcker is quite obviously staring-bonker, and therefore probably won't be looking primarily for the best designer but the one who is a mini-me-Starcker he can moulder. And this would almost certainly rule out anybody foolish enough to talk about "thinking out of the box" – though, amazingly, a contestant called Robert, who uttered the dread phrase after having been sent off to the supermarché with €100 to buy a couple of products – one of a perceived good design, one bad – scraped through to the second round, presumably only because two other people had come up with even more rubbish packaging externalisation solutions.

So Starcker, though clearly staring-bonkers, suffers fools neither gladly nor at all, for which we shall all be very grateful over the next five weeks while marvelling at the amusingly arrogant Nebil, and wondering which of the overly flirtatious female contestants will use all the lifer, sexer, flesher and sweaters at their disposal to irritate Starcker's beautiful director of communications and co-judge, Jasmine (aka Mrs Philippe Starcker) the most.

Though it makes me look less edgy fashionista than Sicilian widow, having been a fashion editrix back in the day, I need very little encouragement to wear head-to-toe black year-round, and especially this weekend, in honour of the 25th London Fashion "Week", when the capital showed its schmutter to an international audience of very thin people who wear head-to-toe black even as they make everybody else wear other stuff, just because they can. Who said fashion folk don't have a sense of humour?

Anyway, I thought of this do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do approach last week while I watched the second of the thrilling (really) three-parter Tweed (BBC4) in which the isle of Harris was no longer entirely in the grip of Yorkshire textile magnate, the brilliantly named Brian Haggas, who had purchased the venerable tweed industry apparently on a retirement whim, reduced the glorious designs from a collection of 8,000 to, er, just four – no, not 4,000, four – and filled his vast warehouse with 75,000 ugly greige coloured boxy two-buttoned men's jackets that nobody in their right, or even wrong, mind would ever want to buy. However, the weavers of Harris have stiff upper looms and plenty of moral fibre, so they will – fingers crossed! – prevail next week. Maybe.

The moral of this story is that you can wait weeks for a stark staring and brilliantly bonkers documentary subject… and then, inevitably, three come along at once.

Making jam for Nigel

After watching Nigel Slater's Simple Suppers (BBC1 - watch it via iPlayer here), I suggested last week that the allotment-grown fir apple potatoes (left) could have been substituted for shop-bought stunt doubles. His response was swift:

"The fir apple potatoes were dug up on the allotment. We looked for something to put the potatoes in to take them to the communal tap, washed them and brought them back to the camping stove to cook them. They weren't from Waitrose. They were entirely the proud efforts of two young people's first attempt at growing their own vegetables. Love Nigel."

Phew! The crisis the controller of BBC1 wasn't calling "Potatogate" has now been averted and, as reparation, Nigel probably deserves a pot of my 2009 plum jam, aka "Kate's toast-grout".